Occasionally a cry is raised that proof has been found of the existence of "Before Day Clubs"--that is, of organizations of Negroes for purposes of violence. The thing is possible and difficult to disprove, but a sequence of crimes through such an organization seems alien to the Negro's habits, and is at least unlikely. The serious charges that the blacks habitually protect any negro criminal who comes to them will be considered farther on. The negro crime about which Southern newspapers print most, Southern writers say most, and which more than anything else aggravates race hatred, is violence to white women. The crime is a dreadful one, made worse by the spreading abroad of details, but it has such a fateful relation to the whole Southern problem that something must here be said, less on the thing itself than on some of the common misunderstandings and misstatements which cluster about it. Statistics are unfortunately too available, inasmuch as for twenty years the number of such crimes has been nearly balanced by the number of lynchings for that offense, which have been tabulated from year to year by the _Chicago Tribune_, and have been thoroughly analyzed by Professor Cutler in his recent book "Lynch Law." From 1882 to 1903 these statistics show an average of thirty-two lynchings per year for violence or attempted violence to white women, though of late they have been reduced to under twenty. This includes some cases of innocent men, probably balanced by assailants who escaped. These figures completely dispose of the allegation that the crime is very frequent. Contrary to common belief in the North, some such cases are tried before regular courts; and in Missouri the Governor in 1908 very properly refused to pardon a Negro under a sentence of death for that crime. Adding in these cases, and the half dozen which perhaps escaped the newspaper reporter, at the utmost there are not over fifty authenticated instances of this crime in the whole South in a twelvemonth. Among something like 3,000,000 adult negro males the ratio of the crime to those who might commit it is about 1 to 600,000; and out of 6,000,000 white women, not over fifty become victims, or 1 in 120,000. For this degree of danger to white women ten million human beings are supposed to be sodden with crime and actuated by malice, and the whole South from end to end is filled with terror.